Sunday, August 28, 2011

#Arabic characters to display the #Qur'an

Readers of #Wikipedia are still expected to have all the fonts on their system necessary to display the texts they are about to read. The Arabic fonts on Ubuntu for instance are not enough to show all the characters used in printing the Qu'ran.

The technology used in printing is not necessarily the same as the technology used in displaying on a computer screen. The result is that several characters used when printing the Qu'ran are missing in Unicode. The King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex has as one of its ambitions to bring the Qu'ran to the Internet and consequently brought several proposals to the Unicode standard and the ISO/IEC10646.

As you can see, quite a number of characters are missing for me. As reading the Qu'ran, requires a high quality font, it would be a gift to the world when the font as used and developed for displaying the Qu'ran becomes available under a Free license. This will ensure that everyone can see and read the Qu'ran as it has been handed down.
Thanks,
GerardM